Main menu

Tag Archives: Google

Post navigation

There’s pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web. In recent months, there have been statements from IETF, IAB (even the other IAB), W3C, and the US Government calling for universal use of encryption by Internet applications, which in the case of the web means HTTPS.

I’m on board with this development 100%. I say this as a web developer who has, and will face some uphill battles to bring everything into HTTPS land. It won’t happen immediately, but the long-term plan is 100% HTTPS . It’s not the easiest move for the internet, but it’s undoubtedly the right move for the internet.

A brief history

The lack of encryption on the internet is not to different from the weaknesses in email and SMTP that make spam so prolific. Once upon a time the internet was mainly a tool of academics, trust was implicit and ethics was paramount. Nobody thought security was of major importance. Everything was done in plain text for performance and easy debugging. That’s why you can use telnet to debug most older popular protocols.

In 2015 the landscape has changed. Academic use of the internet is a small fraction of its traffic. Malicious traffic is a growing concern. Free sharing of information, the norm in the academic world is the exception in some of the places the internet reaches.

Protecting the user

Users deserve to be protected as much as technology will allow. Some folks claim “non-sensitive” data exist. I disagree with this as it’s objective and a matter of personal perspective. What’s sensitive to someone in a certain situation is not sensitive to others. Certain topics that are normal and safe to discuss in most of the world are not safe in others. Certain search queries are more sensitive than others (medical questions, sensitive business research). A web developer doesn’t have a good grasp of what is sensitive or not. It’s specific to the individual user. It’s not every network admin’s right to know if someone on their network browsed and/or purchased pregnancy tests or purchased a book on parenting children with disabilities on Amazon. The former may not go over well at a “free” conservative school in the United States for example. More than just credit card information is considered “sensitive data” in this case. Nobody should be so arrogant as to think they understand how every person on earth might come across their website.

Google and Yahoo took the first step to move search to HTTPS (Bing still seems to be using HTTP oddly enough). This is the obvious second step to protecting the world’s internet users.

Protecting the website’s integrity

Unfortunately you can no longer be certain a user sees a website as you intended it as a web developer. Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. For years ISP’s have been testing the ability to do things like insert ads into webpages. As far as I’m aware in the U.S. there’s nothing explicitly prohibiting replacing ads. Even net neutrality rules seem limited to degrading or discriminating against certain traffic, not modifying payloads.

I’m convinced the next iteration of the great firewall will not explicitly block content, but censor it. It will be harder to detect than just being denied access to a website. The ability to do large-scale processing like this is becoming more practical. Just remove the offending block of text or image. Citizens of oppressed nations will possibly not notice a thing.

There’s also been attempts to “optimize” images and video. Again even net-neutrality is not entirely clear assuming this isn’t targeted to competitors for example.

But TLS isn’t perfect!

True, but let’s be honest, it’s 8,675,309 times better than using nothing. CA’s are a vulnerability, they are a bottleneck, and a potential target for governments looking to control information. But browsers and OS’s allow you to manage certificates. The ability to stop trusting CA’s exists. Technology will improve over time. I don’t expect us to be still using TLS 1.1 and 1.2 in 2025. Hopefully substantial improvements get made over time. This argument is akin to not buying a computer because there will be a faster one next year. It’s the best option today, and we can replace it with better methods when available.

SSL Certificates are expensive!

First of all, domain validation certificates can be found for as little as $10. Secondly, I fully expect these prices to drop as demand increases. Domain verification certificates have virtually no cost as it’s all automated. The cheaper options will experience substantial growth as demand grows. There’s no limit in “supply” except computing power to generate them. A pricing war is inevitable. It would happen even faster if someone like Google bought a large CA and dropped prices to rock bottom. Certificates will get way cheaper before it’s essential. $10 is the early adopter fee.

But XYZ doesn’t support HTTPS!

True, not everyone is supporting it yet. That will change. It’s also true some (like CDN’s) are still charging insane prices for HTTPS. It’s not practical for everyone to switch today. Or this year. But that will change as well as demand increases. Encryption overhead is nominal. Once again pricing wars will happen once someone wants more than their shopping cart served over SSL. The problem today is demand is minimal, but those who need it must have it. Therefore price gouging is the norm.

Seriously, we need to do this?

Yes, seriously. HTTPS is the right direction for the Internet. There’s valid arguments for not switching your site over today, but those roadblocks will disappear and you should be re-evaluating where you stand periodically. I’ve moved a few sites including this blog (SPDY for now, HTTP/2 soon) to experience what would happen. It was largely a smooth transition. I’ve got some sites still on HTTP. Some will be on HTTP for the foreseeable future due to other circumstances, others will switch sooner. This doesn’t mean HTTP is dead tomorrow, or next year. It just means the future of the internet is HTTPS, and you should be part of it.

Looks like I beat this one by a few months. SSL is now a ranking signal for Google. I switched this and a few other sites over to SSL a few months ago, while enabling SPDY and a few other things I’m playing around with. So far this has been pretty painless and actually simplified a few things. Doing this at scale with legacy infrastructure and 3rd parties however is a whole different ballgame. It will take a while for this switch to happen for bigger players not already on board.

Of course I couldn’t pass up a $35 gadget that plugs into my TV and connects to the internet. This is my weakness.

Installation was painless, plugged right into my receiver and the client app you install on your computer found it ASAP. A few minutes (I use WPA2 + MAC filtering) and it was connected to my network and I was streaming video. It looks like it has too main operating modes: mirroring (Hulu seems to use this), and playing from the cloud (which is how YouTube seems to work).

There is a noticeable lag between the video on my laptop and the video on the TV, however the video on the TV is rather good. Sound quality is also pretty good. I went into the options and choose the higher bitrate. So far it’s smooth and runs well.

It sounds like it’s going to become a reality in a few hours: Google Maps for iOS 6.

My experience so far with Apple maps hasn’t been terrible. Data quality issues never actually affected me. I have missed the lack of public transit. That is the primary reason I plan to switch over. Public transit integration is critical in NYC.

I’m hoping it’s just a refreshed UI of what was in iOS 5 with as lean of a UI or leaner.

Earlier this month I complained about how annoying letterboxed iPhone apps are on the iPhone 5 since it shifts the keyboard. The one I used as an example was Google Voice, which has now updated. I thought it was worth mentioning since I did call them out explicitly on it as a shining example of this. Kudos to Google.

Google’s opening up about their data centers in a pretty big way. From being secret to even the locations a few years ago they’ve now posted a street view tour, as well as some pretty great video. Facebook has also become a bit more open in terms of their data center operations.

Part of this openness is to make the “internet” seem more trustworthy and less intimidating. The other part is to show off the energy-saving improvements they are making in the wake of controversy data centers have faced over their power usage.

I think someone at Google or Facebook needs to get me a tour of their facility 😉 .

True story: For several years (2003-ish to 2009-ish) if you did a Google image search for “Washington Monument, one of the first search results you’d see came from me:

Here’s the actual image:

Needless to say it was slightly photoshopped and the fact that this showed up for so many years was quite amusing to me and many others. I’ve gotten a few emails, and quite a bit of traffic over time for it. It was completely unintentional that it SEO’d so well and for so long. Ran across the image today and figured it’s a good time to tell the tale.

Quote of the day goes to Paul Saffo for his opinion piece on Facebook:

Facebook is the Microsoft of social media; used by everyone but truly loved by few.

I’m not sure I 100% agree with the quote, however it does make a valid point about what not to be as a tech company with a huge chunk of the market share. You really want to be the Apple of social media, used by many who absolutely adore you and highly value your product. I’m not sure there’s anyone in social media yet who has achieved that. The closest so far might be Instagram who is now owned by Facebook. Twitter has its loyal users, but many are grumbling over their recent changes and the ever changing app ecosystem.

Paul goes on to say:

Facebook resembles Microsoft in other ways as well. Facebook’s interface is nearly as clunky and inelegant as Windows, and like Microsoft, Facebook is struggling to migrate off the desktop and follow its users onto mobile platforms like smartphones and tablets. Unfortunately, Facebook’s revenue model depends on ample screen real estate in order to please advertisers without annoying users. Ads that can be tolerated on a laptop become a major annoyance when hogging scarce and valuable space on a smartphone.

Facebook can solve for these problems. Facebook will need to move beyond advertising no matter what. Google’s been trying to figure out that problem for a while now. Advertising only gets you so far. Google’s experimented with things like SaaS (Software as a service) via Google Apps. Facebook could potentially bundle up it’s collaboration, authentication, pieces as an alternative to products like SharePoint and Google Groups. Facebook users generally use these things for personal uses, but Facebook apparently utilizes its own features for it’s own purposes all along. There’s not terribly much blocking them from making that a product itself. Facebook also has vast amounts of data and could make itself into a research platform. Both would be viable options and quite frankly could be killer products.

It’s an amazing thing regardless for a company as young as Facebook to be compared to Microsoft. Lets just hope they can avoid the pitfalls that have hit Microsoft in the past decade.

For those not keeping score, Twitter, and Facebook have both come out publicly in favor of SPDY. Twitter is already using it in production. It sounds like Facebook will be soon. Mozilla implemented it in Firefox. Opera has SPDY. Google, the author of SPDY is using it in production.

This leaves Microsoft and Apple as the holdouts. Microsoft’s HTTP + Mobility is SPDY at it’s core. Microsoft hasn’t started supporting SPDY in any products, but it seems inevitable at some point. They are a holdout in implementation but not opposed to SPDY it seems.

Apple is the last major holdout. SPDY hasn’t been announced for iOS 6 or Mac OS X 10.8. As far as I’m aware Apple hasn’t made any statement suggesting support or opposition to SPDY. However I can’t see why they would oppose it. There’s nothing for them to disapprove of, other than it’s not using their IP. I’d be surprised if they don’t want to implement it.

However given SPDY is a rather backwards compatible thing to support, I don’t see this holding back adoption. Nginx is adding support for SPDY (thanks to WordPress creator Automattic), and Google is working on mod_spdy for Apache. That makes adoption for lots of large websites possible.

While the details of SPDY and the direction it will go are still in flux, it seems nearly certain that SPDY is the future of the web. Time to start digging into how to adopt it and ease the transition. The primary concerns I see are as follow:

TLS Required – While not explicitly required, SPDY essentially builds on TLS and virtually any real world application needs it. This means purchasing SSL certificates for any website you wish to use SPDY with. Some have argued performance and scalability, but Google, Facebook and Twitter use SSL extensively on commodity hardware.

IP Address – Unless you use Server Name Indication (SNI), which almost no websites do because of compatibility, you need an IP address for every hostname that you use TLS with. That means until IPv6 is widely adopted, it will be putting further strain on the remaining IPv4 pool.

Both of the above concerns increase complexity and cost of building websites at scale and for those who are on a very tight budget (the rest of us will manage). Because of this, I don’t think we’ll see a 100% SPDY or HTTP 2.0 web for quite some time. Don’t expect SPDY for shared hosting sites anytime soon.

In a world of increasing surveillance and user data being integrated into everything, the benefits of TLS will be realized. Both Facebook and Twitter acknowledge it’s importance in preventing user data from getting into the wrong hands.

Google is pervasive about associating Chrome with being fast. It’s was their primary pitch when they first announced it. Back when Firefox went 1.0, it wasn’t so much about speed but “not sucking” as all the geeks liked to say. Given IE 6 was the competition, that was likely the best marketing on earth. Sure it was faster, but sucking fast wasn’t nearly as good as not sucking. Not sucking encompassed the missing features, broken rendering, crashing, constant parade of security problems. It summarized the product surprisingly well for not being an official slogan by any means.

Google now launched Chrome for iOS. On the desktop Chrome and Safari both use WebKit, Chrome applies it’s own touches to make things faster. Notably they have their own JS engine. Safari also has it’s own JS engine. This is the secret sauce of performance. In the iOS world however Apple being the totalitarian dictator decided that iOS will provide WebKit and JS. If your app has any web browser functionality it will utilize these API’s and not implement it’s own engine. Verbatim:

2.17 Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript

Google Chrome for iOS however is Google integration into a reskinned experience of Safari. It’s the same browser. Just a new UI bolted on with some Google features integrated in. It’s not a separate browser. It’s a UI.

That however doesn’t stop Google’s marketing machine (I’d argue Apple marketing’s top rival) from putting “fast” as the second word:

Browse fast with Chrome, now available on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Sign in to sync your personalized Chrome experience from your computer, and bring it with you anywhere you go.

It goes on to clarify:

Search and navigate fast, directly from the same box. Choose from results that appear as you type.

So Google isn’t truly misleading. It’s just very strategic wording.

The truth of the matter however is that Google Chrome on iOS is substantially slower than Safari. Safari uses Nitro to accelerate JavaScript, which powers most of the complicated websites that will slow down a browser on any modern device. Apple however restricts Nitro to Safari, and doesn’t let third party apps like Google Chrome use it. This is still the case as of iOS 5, and I believe is the case in iOS 6, though I haven’t personally verified that.

How much slower is Google Chrome on iOS in comparison to Safari? Well Here’s a SunSpider test I did on my iPad 3:

So really, if you’re using Chrome on iOS, it’s because you absolutely love the design and integration with Google’s services, and are willing to trade off considerable JavaScript performance for those perks.

That however doesn’t stop many people from thinking it’s fast. Just in the past few minutes I’m able to find these Tweets among the thousands streaming across the web. I won’t mention or link to them directly (you could find them however if you wanted):

“Chrome for iOS is FAST, takes the mobile browsing experience to a new level.”

“I like it! It’s fast and can sync with Chrome desktop, which I use all of the time.”

“Liking #chrome on #iOS very slick, fast and clean looking”

“using chrome on my iphone right now.. cant believe how fast it is”

“That chrome for iOS is freaking fast but so basic. No tweet button, no add-on. Man I kinda disappointed. I give ’em 1 ‘fore the update”

“Chrome for iOS? Hell yes!! So fast! #chrome”

“Google Chrome for iOS is fast.”

“Holy hell Chrome is fast on the iPad.”

The most touted feature isn’t actually a feature. It’s technically not even there. The numbers and the technology insist that it’s not (they prove it’s actually slower). But that’s what everyone is ranting and raving about. You could argue Google’s UI is faster, but I’d be highly skeptical that Google’s found Cocoa tricks Apple engineers haven’t. Perhaps a UI transition or two makes you think it’s faster or more responsive, however even that I can’t find any evidence of.

All the hard work the Google engineers did squeezing their services into a compact simple to use UI are ignored in favor of this non-existent feature. And as a developer who can’t ignore such a thing, I will say they did a great job with their UI.